Curations

This is What I Want 2010, 2011

This is What I Want

THIS IS WHAT I WANT was a performance festival created in 2010 by a curatorial commission from Joe Landini at The Garage to dance artist Jesse Hewit. The festival, a favorite centerpiece of the annual National Queer Arts Festival, called on dance and performance artists to create shorter new works that responded to the prompt ‘This Is What I Want’ within the context of desire and sexuality, and how those elements make their way in or out of contemporary performance work. The festival produced singularly strong and memorable work from artists such as Annie Danger, Jess Curtis, Anna Martine Whitehead, Xandra Ibarra, Dia Dear, Monique Jenkinson, Chase Joynt, Mica Sigourney, Ben McCoy, Hana Erdman, DavEnd, and Keith Hennessy.

For 2012 (Jesse as guest curator), the creation of the festival changed hands and became a project of Tessa Wills, thus shifting its focus to a more sex and fetish-based community of practitioners, and diving more directly into the social politics of sex-based communities. In 2013, Jesse left the project and Tessa continues to create THIS IS WHAT I WANT within a different, but rigorous and excellent, creative context.